Saturday Training – 11th May

Saturday training was another glorious day. After extending our swims around the south end over the last couple of weeks, Coach Zoe decided it was time to take it to the natural conclusions and swim from Bondi, around to Tamarama and back.

Brilliant! It’s been about a year since I last did this swim, and I have come a long way with my swimming since then. Last time I did it, I kind of struggled, ended up swimming by myself most of the way, and was so tired by the time I got there I hopped out and walked back along the path to Bondi.

Here was my chance….

Except not. Unfortunately, although I rarely make to many plans for Saturdays around swim time, I had a birthday lunch to get to. I’d figured it would be OK, since I needed to start tapering on my training anyway before next weekend’s big swim. Anyway, it takes longer than the standard hour (for me at least) to swim there and back, so today was not going to be my day. Ah well, there’s always another day…I’m sure my chance will come around again.

Not that it meant there was no swimming fun to be had. I swam out with the group to the point where we regrouped. I then headed in with some of the newer swimmers who weren’t yet feeling up for such a long swim, and we stuck together as a group and swam in towards the South end of Bondi.

Proving that the ocean always offers something different, we swam over a massive school of fish. I don’t mean a lot of fish swimming around, but literally a horizontal wall of medium sized grey fish, clumped together and stretched out for metres and metres. I managed one snap…it’s not a great one, sorry, but you can kind of see just the sort of density of wildlife I’m talking about.

After the initial puzzlement of trying to figure out what was going on, we all stopped just to have a look at the mass of life below the surface. They seemed completely unperturbed by us, and soon enough we set off towards the beach, and the school of fish continued on to wherever they were headed.

I love that the ocean can still floor me with awe and wonder, even after nearly 3 years of swimming in it as much as I can. It feels more like an adventure than a sport, sometimes, and that’s one of the many reasons I love it.